[The following story contains spoilers from the first five episodes of The Drop: A Snowfall Saga, through “Homecoming.”]
If you Google Snowfall spinoff The Drop, one of the most popular questions is “Is Franklin in The Drop: A Snowfall Saga?”
Those who’ve paid close attention to the news around the follow-up to the FX drama about the origins of the crack cocaine epidemic, starring Damson Idris as eventual drug kingpin Franklin Saint, would know that the answer is no.
Idris’ fallen entrepreneur isn’t expected to appear in the ’90s-set series, which centers around Gail Bean‘s Wanda and Isaiah John‘s Leon, two of the survivors of the original show.
The Drop: A Snowfall Saga centers around the rise of West Coast hip-hop, against the backdrop of street violence, as Wanda pursues a career in the music industry and Leon continues to operate his nonprofit community legal center.
And, for The Drop showrunner Malcolm Spellman, it wasn’t until he “let go” of the original series that he found the hook for the spinoff, which he says hit him “like a bolt of lightning.”
“I think in the beginning of development, I was really chasing Snowfall, and I couldn’t land a pilot,” Spellman tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We were probably developing the pilot for over two years before I found this tone and really found this family and found this energy and soul for the show, and even then it was still a learning process. But it was really, really hard to land here. And once we landed there, everything was organic. We knew when to reference Franklin, the other guys. We knew who to bring in and everything, almost as if we’d always been doing it because we took the time to let it become its own thing first, so that it could organically interface with the original.”
Across The Drop‘s first five episodes of an eight-episode first season, Snowfall fans haven’t seen any memorable characters from the original — beyond Wanda, Leon and a cameo from Quincy Chad’s Deon — and they shouldn’t necessarily expect to, Spellman says.
“I’m not gonna chase cameos,” Spellman says. “There’s nobody I’m gonna put in this show just to have them in it. This show exists in a space where hustlers and fly girls who were in Snowfall would obviously be around this scene, and those characters from Snowfall who are gonna emerge in the show will raise their hands. We don’t pick them. Those characters should raise their hands in the middle of us breaking an episode and say, ‘I should be here.’”
Chad, Spellman says is “a perfect example of how the old show should lock into this one.”
Five episodes into an eight-episode first season, Tuesday night’s installment pauses the hip-hop story to focus on producing prodigy Lamar (Asante Blackk) learning the truth about how his mother died — a tragic accident that was connected to her involvement in the music industry, which has made Lamar’s grandparents, who raised him and his brother James (Peyton Alex Smith), strongly opposed to Lamar getting into the rap game.
Speaking to THR, Spellman talks about why he wanted to turn a full episode over to the story of what happened to Lamar’s mom, the lighter tone of The Drop, why he’s trying to craft an authentic portrayal of his community but not tell the origin story of real-life hip-hop heavyweights and why he’s confident the show is a hit.
How did you get involved with this spinoff? You didn’t work on the original Snowfall, but you knew [Snowfall co-creator] John Singleton.
Me being involved with the show was kind of destiny. I’ve been tight with John since I broke into Hollywood. The whole process he had through Snowfall, me and him was in contact, texting, talking, hanging out. And mutually with FX, I’d worked on a documentary series called Hip Hop Uncovered that I’m super proud of. That’s in this space kind of, so they knew me from that, and then there was a long relationship even with the original producers of Snowfall; my wife had been on the show. If you know me and what I do, I was the obvious call here, just because the relationship had been so established, and it’s right in my wheelhouse.
For people who weren’t in this community or aware, what is the connective tissue between the origins of the crack epidemic and West Coast hip-hop and the gang violence of the ’90s. How does the show still exist in the Snowfall world and make sense as a follow-up?
I think the crack epidemic and hip-hop coming to the West Coast made the two phenomenons conjoined twins. The crack epidemic is a complete nuclear bomb that drops on our community in ways that can be explained, but also culturally it shifted the identity, in my opinion. [For] Black folk, I feel like the beginning of our story, all the way up to crack, is a continuum of us as a collective dealing with a system that’s oppressive. When crack comes, it says it’s not you guys as a collective anymore against the system, it’s the system against you guys as individual entrepreneurs in the street, and hip-hop was the soundtrack to that and the news report to it. So on one hand, you have a phenomenon and a bomb going off in a specific community, which is Snowfall, and then on the other hand, you have The Drop, which is sort of the news report that is speaking on this phenomenon, and I believe if you just listen to West Coast hip-hop, I don’t know how you would extract it from crack.
In terms of the other characters, like the non-Wanda and Leon characters, how did you figure out that you wanted to have someone like a Lamar, an aspiring producer from this super religious family, and Artillery (Simmie “Buddy” Sims III) as the aspiring rapper and someone like DG (Brandon Mychal Smith), the record label executive?
Those characters really came to life when I did that rewrite. It just was all there. It all filled out in the vibe of the show. I’d say Lamar is a very personal character to me. I was not quite as odd as the character, but I was odd and I was an artist, and I feel like I had a similar temperament to Lamar, and I knew the struggles that I saw up close, being directly involved with all this happening, and I knew Lamar as a counterpoint to Wanda, who’s experienced the streets in every possible fucking way, from murder to success to depression to drug abuse. Of course, her partner should be the polar opposite. That’s just basic storytelling. And the truth is, I feel like the dimensions of Blackness and watching the audience kind of struggle with Lamar at times is fascinating to me because I feel like we all got him in our families, but you don’t see him on TV. You only get to see gangsters or cool motherfuckers or cops or whatever.
Obviously, we find out more about Lamar’s family and his mother, but the family is very opposed to Lamar being involved with the music industry because of what happened with his mom and wants him to be involved with the church. Where did that background come from?
This is all the shit that’s been neglected for the last 40 years since crack hit. This nation is still a fairly religious nation, and our community is very, very connected to the church. That shit should be generic damn near in everything we do and not presented as a fetish. These characters wield God and the Bible specifically and all that in the way people who were raised in church would, the vibe of these characters and the specificness. Everything you see on the show is either something I experienced directly, seen directly or one of my homeboys [experienced or saw]. I was involved. I was in it, and I got to see all this happen, and I got to see it wasn’t on TV in a way that I feel was authentic. I knew it was these details that you are talking about, like even their opinion on hip-hop or Big Daddy’s (Mykleti Williamson) opinion on the N-word. No one ever shows that word was never just certified in our community. We have a discussion in the public about whether other races should be allowed to use it. That shit never got resolved with us, and so to show that discussion on TV in the way that it happens in barbershops or in homes, to me is the special sauce of this thing, and that’s all shit I’ve seen up close and personal.
All of episode five is devoted to what happened to Lamar’s mother. Why did you want to take that full episode to unpack all of that?
It was a build. When we were laying out the season, there was a real rhythm to how these episodes were connecting with each other, how they were all featuring different dynamics. Some feature violence, some feature music, some feature Black joy, and in a way that I think is like spectacle. And as it was coming together, we were feeling a way to build up the importance of this family conflict and starve the audience for the answer, and we were like, how long can we starve the audience and how satisfying can the answer be? And as we started to roadmap that, it became very apparent even before we’d written episode two that episode five was going to have to be a version of itself.
You’ve spoken extensively about authenticity, and not only were you in the community, but you also have writers and consultants who were in it as well. But how much are you thinking in terms of well-known real-life counterparts or is it more of just like a broader sense of authenticity about the community?
That’s interesting what you’re saying because when I look online, everybody thinks these characters are based on someone from the original Snowfall or from a rap album or whatever. These are all people I grew up with, was in the streets with. I did not look at it like that. Every one of these characters is somebody I know, either lost or still hang out with. Even in the writers’ room, people would be like, oh, this reminds me of this dude or this legend or whatever, and we might talk about the legend that that sort of embodies what the character has, but for me they were just born out of that one fitful moment when the show hit me. And to me, these are the real people. Like my boy who was in the room was at Death Row from beginning to end. My boy is in the show, not the people at Death Row. That’s how I’m writing it. This is an eyewitness.
One of the things that struck me from the pilot is how The Drop has a lighter tone than Snowfall, which, especially in the final season, was very heavy just because of the nature of the story it was telling. But I think you’ve spoken about this: There being maybe less violence in this show and there’s so much about the uplifting and healing power of music. Can you talk about how intentional that tone was and why you wanted to take that approach?
As someone who was directly affected by the drug phenomenon — I caught my first felony drug case in the late 1980s — every great filmmaker in America should have a crack movie or show under their belt if they take it seriously and understand that these stories reshaped and still define all of America and pop culture today. I knew the tone, the lightness, the humor, the love, the Black joy was a flip side to the coin of crack, of murder, millionaires made overnight and then lost and addiction and all that. They always went hand in hand together. Since none of our lead characters are actually pursuing crime, it made it easier to work into those pockets and show the flip side of the same coin.
At the time that we’re talking, three episodes have aired. What sort of feedback have you encountered? What’s the reaction to the show that you’ve caught wind of?
The shit I care about, which is the community, and I’m still tapped in; it’s off the charts, and for me, nothing else matters. I don’t read reviews. What I will do is go to every single reaction channel I can, because those reactors are people from our community who love this kind of material and talk to people like them. That shit has been off the fucking charts, and I’m not scared to say it. I think the culture saw official people was behind us, felt it and embraced it in a way that’s gonna make this thing a force to be reckoned with. And, of course, let me first shout out the foundation to all of this is the original Snowfall fans. If we lose them, we’re fucked, and we didn’t. But overall, I can tell you the response to this shit is nuts, and ain’t no one called to tell me that, and they don’t have to, because I go out into the world. I can see it. I’ve done everything from Falcon and the Winter Soldier to Empire to Bel-Air. I know what the fuck a hit feels like. This motherfucker is a hit.
The Drop: A Snowfall Saga airs Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. on FX and Hulu.
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